How Appending Data Helps You Sell More Effectively

In a perfect world, every single sales record would be completely accurate with up-to-date names, phone numbers, and email addresses. Sales reps would follow up and instantly hear replies back from eager customers. Trumpets would ring out from the heavens and gold would fall from the skies.

Unfortunately, we live in the real world. No matter how great your lead capture forms or sales prospecting tools are, there’s a good chance that something’s going to be missing. With a quality append service, you can fill in these gaps in your sales data and take your selling to the next level.

Use Data Append to Find Customers’ Preferred Contact Method

Good sales reps know that they have to come to prospects where they are. If someone doesn’t want to talk to you on the phone but is willing to hear a pitch for a new product or service through email, you can increase your success rate by emailing them.

But what if you only have their phone number? What if they accidentally (or intentionally) gave you the wrong email address? You’re stuck trying to reach someone on a channel they don’t want to talk to you on, which automatically stacks the odds against you. If you had a data append or an email list cleaning service, you’d be able to see their email address and reach out to them the way they want to be contacted.

Validating Unknown Leads with Data Append Services

On the other hand, let’s say you have a brand new lead you don’t know much about. Maybe it came in through a colleague or personal friend. You have some basic contact info, but you aren’t even sure if they would be a qualified lead.

Instead of wasting time with a lead who might not even be a good fit for what you’re selling, use a data append service to learn more about the prospect. If your company’s offering is targeted to enterprise-level organizations with 500+ employees, a lead that runs a small business with two other staff members isn’t a great fit.

There are lots of other ways that data append services can help you get more information and sell more effectively, including:

Filling out leads that come from social media. Say a Facebook fan of your company writes a comment on a recent update saying they’re interested in buying. Instead of just talking to them through Facebook, an append service can add their email address or phone number to their contact record so you can have greater control over the interaction.

Getting the titles and job descriptions of prospects to customize content delivery. Maybe you are a creative marketing company and you’ve written a guide designed specifically for marketing managers. With data append, you can find out which of your current prospects have the title “Marketing Manager” and then send them more relevant correspondence.

Lead scoring. Perhaps prospects in the engineering field are much more likely to buy your offering than prospects in the software field. But if all you have is a name and phone number or email address, how will you know what type of company they work for? Append services fill out this information so you can get a more accurate sense of how warm a lead is.